Preparing Sermons from the Page to the Pulpit (eBook)

CHAPTER 2

KEEPING IT TOGETHER

DETERMINING THE OUTER LIMITS

Psalm 14 states, “There is no God.” None of the English translations of this verse say, “There is no god”—meaning, as Scripture affirms elsewhere, that there is only one God in existence, the Judeo-Christian God of the Bible, and that anything else that people call “god” does not exist. No, it says, “There is no God.” Does that mean that the Scripture has a secret atheistic agenda? Not at all—not when we consider the rest of the words around that sentence. The whole verse declares, “The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.” They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds; there is none who does good” (Ps 14:1). Clearly, reading the whole verse can make an enormous difference to how we understand a text.

The importance of knowing when a passage starts or stops cannot be overlooked. When choosing a passage to preach, you need to determine the proper text boundaries to ensure you are capturing one complete thought, rather than a truncated thought or one whole thought of one passage plus part of another. Oftentimes, finding the upper and lower limits of a passage seems self-evident. But sometimes it is not, as is the case, say, in Galatians 2, where Paul moves seamlessly from retelling his encounter with Peter to discourse and explanation. At any rate, care must be taken not to cut a verse or two off from the unit to which it properly belongs. Knowing what constitutes one complete text unit will help you establish the authorial intention in the text. How do we go about figuring out the upper and lower verse boundaries of a passage? There are a number of ways.

CONTENT AS A BOUNDARY MARKER

Perhaps the most obvious clue to determining a text’s upper and lower limits is the content of the text itself: the passage of interest is different from the neighboring verses and it reads like a self-contained unit of thought. For example, consider the first chapter of Philippians, which consists of thirty verses. It would certainly be possible for you to preach the entire chapter as one sermon, perhaps if you wanted to do a four-week series covering Philippians, where each chapter could constitute a sermon text. But the chapter does subdivide into smaller, coherent paragraph thought units, based solely on what the section is about:

•Philippians 1:1–2 is the opening salutation.

•Philippians 1:3–8 is Paul’s opening remarks of thanksgiving.

•Philippians 1:9–11 is Paul’s prayer for the church.

•Philippians 1:12–26 is Paul’s personal update.

•Philippians 1:27–30 is the first of Paul’s exhortations to unity.

These subunits, then, could either generate a main point for the sermon that encompasses the entire chapter, or a subunit could be preached by itself if you wanted to devote more than just four weeks to Philippians.

INCLUSIO AS A BOUNDARY MARKER

Frequently, an author will indicate a unit of thought with what scholars call an inclusio: a rhetorical device where the first and last verses of a unit are conceptually or linguistically parallel to each other. Thus, the first and last verses serve as bookends to frame the unit. For example, while commentators recognize the first eighteen verses of John’s Gospel as constituting the prologue, verse 1 (“In the beginning was the Word [ho logos], and the Word [ho logos] was with God, and the Word [ho logos] was God”) and verse 14 (“The Word [ho logos] became flesh and made his dwelling among us”) form an inclusio with the repetition of ho logos as well as the conceptual parallels of Word-substance, Word-location. Thus John 1:1–14 would form a larger subunit within the prologue. Detecting an inclusio in narrative texts like John can play an important role in identifying the boundaries of a text.

In the first creation story of Genesis, Bible translations end chapter one with verse 31: “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.” Remembering that chapters and verses were not a part of the original text (for any book of the Bible), a closer look at the narrative reveals that the creation account does not end at verse 31 (which the chapter and verse demarcations lead modern readers to believe). The first account, rather, extends into Genesis 2. Genesis 1:1 states, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” and 2:4a completes the inclusio: “These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created.” The second, close-up creation story, then, begins in Genesis 2:4b. Therefore, to preach the entire first creation account in one sermon, the lower boundary would need to extend to 2:4a—as the biblical author’s inclusio indicates.

NARRATIVE FEATURES AS BOUNDARY MARKERS

When it comes to narrative, authors will typically signify a unit shift through changes in time, location, setting, or character. In Matthew 2, the different setting for each of the paragraphs indicates the textual boundaries within the chapter: the visitation of the magi in verses 1–12 takes place around Bethlehem, verses 13–18 describe the flight of Jesus’s family to Egypt, and verses 19–23 record their return to the land of Israel. If you wanted to preach the entirety of chapter 2, each of these scenes or sections could generate a main point for the sermon. If, however, you wanted to park on chapter two for several Sundays, then each scene/section could constitute its own sermon text. Or, consecutive subunits could be combined for a sermon; for example, verses 1–12 plus verses 13–18 (i.e., 2:1–18) could comprise a sermon text, or perhaps 2:13–23.

Geographical scene changes also demarcate the subsections in Genesis 12, the call of Abram: in 12:1–4, Abram is in Haran;1 in verses 4–9, the patriarch travels throughout Canaan; in verses 10–20, he is in Egypt. In the preaching of Genesis 12, each of these units could comprise a main point in the sermon.

Changes in characters signal the different subunits in the opening chapters of 1 Samuel. The narrative begins with Elkanah, Hannah, and Eli (1:1–20); then Samuel gets added in verses 21–28. The first part of the second chapter focuses on Hannah (2:1–10), moving to Eli’s sons and their father (2:12–26) before closing out the chapter with the account of the man of God and Eli (2:27–36), followed by God’s calling of Samuel that features Samuel and Eli in 1 Samuel 3. Once again, each of these scenes could generate a sermon text, or these subunits could be combined to form a larger passage for the sermon.

CATCHWORDS AS BOUNDARY MARKERS

Another way a biblical author can indicate the boundaries of a text is by using certain catchwords or transitional conjunctions like “therefore,” “and,” “but,” “now,” or “then.” In the middle warning passage of Hebrews, the inclusio of 5:11 and 6:12 indicates that the unit of thought begins in 5:11 and finishes in 6:12.2 The use of dio (“therefore”) in 6:1 would signal the start of a new subunit, to be distinguished from 5:11–14.

In a passage that Jesus applies to the Pharisees and Paul quotes to the Corinthians, the prophet Isaiah preached:

And the Lord said: “Because this people draw near with their mouth and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me, and their fear of me is a commandment taught by men, therefore (lkn), behold, I will again do wonderful things with this people, with wonder upon wonder; and the wisdom of their wise men shall perish, and the discernment of their discerning men shall be hidden.” (Isa 29:13–14)

While both verses together constitute God’s rebuke of Israel, lkn (“therefore”) indicates the end of one subunit (the human cause) and the beginning of a second (the divine effect).

Near the end of Paul’s exposition of freedom and contrast between believers in Christ and people living under the authority of the Mosaic law, he concludes in Galatians 4:28–5:1:

Now (de) you, brothers and sisters, like Isaac, are children of promise. At that time the son born according to the flesh persecuted the son born by the power of the Spirit. It is the same now. But what does Scripture say? “Get rid of the slave woman and her son, for the slave woman’s son will never share in the inheritance with the free woman’s son.” Therefore (dio), brothers and sisters, we are not children of the slave woman, but of the free woman. It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then (oun), and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.

Paul’s use of de (“now”) in verse 28 indicates that verse 28 represents the interpretive application he draws from the citation of Isaiah 54:1 in the previous verse. The dio (“therefore”) in verse 31 signals the concluding thought to Paul’s argument in the preceding verses. The first part of 5:1 reinforces his conclusion, while 5:1b with oun (“then”) marks a transition to the next, new thought unit in Galatians 5:2–15. Phrases like dia touto (“for this reason”), charin...